CEE Professor Khalid Alshibli gave a keynote lecture at the IS-Atlanta 2018, an international conference for geotechnical engineers. His lecture, entitled “Particle Level Constitutive Behavior of Sand,” highlights the importance of considering the anisotropic behavior (i.e., different engineering properties when loading a sand grain in different directions) when compressing an individual sand grain.
He is the first researcher in the geomechanics field to discover that individual sand grains exhibit anisotropic behavior. Understanding the interaction between sand grains using 3D experimental measurements has a critical impact on developing new theories about the behavior of sand.